Rep.\u00a0John Ratcliffe\u00a0(R-Texas),\u00a0President Trump\u2019s nominee for director of national intelligence (DNI), refused to say Tuesday whether he agreed with the Intelligence Community\u2019s (IC) assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 elections to help the president.<\/p>\n
The original conclusions:\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>Both the IC and the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that Russia interfered in the 2016 elections to favor Trump. The House Intelligence Committee\u2019s Republican majority concluded in 2018 that Russia interfered in the elections, but did not conclude this was to favor Trump, an analysis Democratic members of the committee disagreed with.<\/p>\n When asked about his thoughts on these conclusions by Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner (D-Va.) during the nomination hearing, Ratcliffe would not commit to one side.<\/p>\n Not taking sides:\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>Ratcliffe said that while he had \u201cno reason to dispute\u201d the Senate panel\u2019s findings, he also would not dispute the House Intelligence Committee\u2019s conclusions, a panel on which Ratcliffe serves.<\/p>\n \u201cI respect both committees, but I have not seen the underlying intelligence to tell me why there is a difference of opinion between the two committees,\u201d Ratcliffe said.<\/p>\n Ratcliffe did agree that Russian interference took place in 2016, and he said that he expects Russia to remain a threat to elections.<\/p>\n \u201cThe most important takeaway of the findings I think of both committees is that as Russia continues to sow discord that they have not been successful at changing votes or the outcome of the election, and we need to remain committed to making sure that does not happen in the future,\u201d Ratcliffe said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Rep.\u00a0John Ratcliffe\u00a0(R-Texas),\u00a0President Trump\u2019s nominee for director...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24403","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-u-s-a"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24403","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24403"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24403\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24404,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24403\/revisions\/24404"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}